The L.A. Times Must Think You Won’t Click Its Links

It says something for the weakness of your argument when you have to turn your opponents’ argument on its head. Take the L.A. Times editorial today (11/24/08) headlined “An Unfair Litmus Test.”

The editorial claims that “some ardent supporters of Barack Obama are aggrieved because the president-elect’s emergent national security team includes supporters of the Iraq War,” and argues that “making opposition to the war a litmus test for service in the new administration would be both unfair and impractical.”

But are the complaints from the left really that supporters of the Iraq invasion are not being treated as “pariahs,” as the editorial claims? The link in the last paragraph is from the paper’s online version, and it goes to an L.A. Times news report (11/20/08) that quotes FAIR associate Sam Husseini on the names floated as Obama cabinet picks: “It’s astonishing that not one of the 23 senators or 133 House members who voted against the war is in the mix,” he says. It also quotes Kevin Martin of Peace Action, who worries that Obama’s foreign policy team “may turn out to be all pro-war, or at least people who were pro-war in the beginning.”

So the source the L.A. Times points to back up its claim that the left wants supporters of the invasion to be excluded from Obama’s administration actually features complaints from the left that opponents of the invasion are being excluded from Obama’s administration. I guess the editorialists must think that nobody reads L.A. Times news articles–even when they link to them.

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Extra! Magazine Editor Since 1990, Jim Naureckas has been the editor of Extra!, FAIR's monthly journal of media criticism. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the '90s. He is also the co-manager of FAIR's website. He has worked as an investigative reporter for the newspaper In These Times, where he covered the Iran-Contra scandal, and was managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere, a newsletter on Latin America. Jim was born in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1964, and graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in political science. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR's program director. You can follow Jim on Twitter at @JNaureckas.

[…] Kos, MoveOn.org and the like–to Obama’s Cabinet choices. You don’t have to look very hard to find indignant bile. But Obama isn’t in awe, or fearful, of these folks because he has built his own Netroots machine. […]